


The Investigation

by IgnorantArmies



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, Uncharted 2, Uncharted 4, angsty fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-25 01:57:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14368419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IgnorantArmies/pseuds/IgnorantArmies
Summary: Ever since Cassie had ‘accidentally-on-purpose’ opened her father’s cabinet and discovered the artefacts inside, no one was safe from her cross-questioning.





	The Investigation

Ever since Cassie had ‘accidentally-on-purpose’ opened her father’s cabinet and discovered the artefacts inside, no one was safe from her cross-questioning. 

Her dad had given her what she suspected was a highly abridged version of each adventure – there were a bunch of inconsistencies and certain moments where he'd skip over details without meeting her eyes – and he made the whole thing sound like a great big game, not the life and death struggle it must have been. The tales continued long after their boat ride and late into the night until her parents had practically begged her to go to bed, promising they’d continue the story the next day. And the next. And the next. Eventually, he’d let her look at his journals and she’d combed through them until his sketches hovered inside her eyelids when she slept.

But it still wasn’t enough. And so, like her mother’s daughter and a true-born researcher, Cassie had sought out secondary sources and evidence and corroborating accounts.

She’d begun ‘The Investigation’.

#

She knew her parents were all talked out so she went further afield – out on the periphery – starting with someone whose mouth was always a little bit looser than her loyalty.

She texted Chloe a picture of the little glass vial from her father’s cabinet - the one that held a few fragments of the explosive, madness-inducing blue resin from Shambhala – with the caption: ‘Pretty, huh? Dare me to shake it?’

Cassie’s phone started ringing a few seconds later and before she’d even got it to her ear she could hear Chloe yelling, “Cassie! Don’t touch it!”

“Hey Clo.”

“I’m serious, don’t touch that stuff. I don’t know where you found it – and what the hell your dad was thinking about _keeping_ it - but it’s dangerous, Cass, I mean it-”

Cassie had started laughing quietly half way through the tirade and eventually Chloe noticed.

“Ohhhh you little shitbag.”

Cassie grinned. “So… you and my dad _dated_? Really?!”

She heard Chloe groan. “We are _not_ having this conversation, Cassandra.”

“Okay, so tell me about Tibet, then. Were there really crazy blue guys and glowing tree sap?”

“Where the hell have you been snooping, young lady?”

Cassie tried a little white lie on for size. “My dad told me everything.”

Chloe paused for a second. “Everything?”

“Well, mostly everything.”

“Okay, fine," Chloe sighed, admitting defeat. "But if your dad asks, you didn’t hear any of it from me.”

“Of course." Cassie's relationship with Chloe had certain unspoken rules.

“Tibet, huh? Well, yeah, there were crazy blue guys. And yeah, Shambhala was real. Except it wasn’t the goldmine we thought it would be. I’m guessing your dad told you how he blew the whole city up, right?”

“Seems to be a running theme.”

Chloe gave a cackling laugh. “You’ve got that right. That, and ending up in some ridiculous situation like hanging off a mountain on a derailed train…”

Cassie frowned. She hadn’t heard this one. “Wait, what train?”

After a brief pause she heard Chloe swear under her breath. “Train?” she tried, in an overly-bright voice, “Did I say train?”

“Chloe…?”

“Ah crap.”

#

“You just happened to forget to tell me about the _train_?!”

She’d cornered her father while he was changing into his wetsuit, about to head out for a dive. He froze, half-dressed, and gave her a sheepish grin.

“Hey kiddo. What’s up?” He aimed for casual innocence but Cassie was having none of it.

She pointed an accusatory finger at the faded scar tissue on his left hip. He’d always told her it was an ‘occupational hazard’ – an old wound from a skirmish with pirates off the coast of Panama – but Chloe had spilled the real story in gruesome detail.

“You got shot? Hanging from a train? Because of a _girl_?!”

Her dad rubbed his palm against the scar with a habitual wince of memory then shimmied the wetsuit over his shoulders and fumbled with the zip, as if he could make the conversation go away by covering up the old wound. “Hey, it was _Chloe_ , okay? Not just some girl. And she was in trouble.”

Cassie made a disbelieving face. “ _She_ said she had it all under control. _She_ said the reason you never came home with any treasure was because you always tried to act the hero.”

“Yeah, she’s probably right.” He grimaced. “What else she tell you?”

“What else _didn’t_ you tell me? You nearly _died_ , Dad!” To Cassie’s surprise, her throat was tight with the threat of tears. She’d known her parents had got themselves in and out of some pretty hairy situations but the harsh reality was suddenly right in front of her. _He could have died. About twenty times over._

Her father took a step toward her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Cass… That was a long time ago. And it turned out alright in the end. That’s all that matters.”

“But why did Flynn shoot you?” she asked quietly. “I thought he was your friend.”

Her dad’s brow furrowed with discomfort and she almost regretted digging up the truth. This was why he’d lied – or omitted the truth – maybe it was all too painful. Guilt made fresh tears prickle at her eyes.

“He was,” her father said at last, with a distant look, “But greed does strange things to people, I guess.”

“I hope you kicked his ass,” Cassie growled, suddenly filled with a primal protectiveness for her dad and all the crap he’d been through.

He gave a weak smile. “I didn’t have to. Lazarević got there first. Your mom tried to help him but he… he didn’t think he was worth saving. Thought it was better to blow himself up – nearly took us with him, too.”

“Oh my god…” 

He squeezed her shoulder and she wrapped her arms around his middle, ignoring the rubbery stink of the wetsuit, burying her face in his chest. She wasn’t so old that she didn’t sometimes need her dad to make her feel safe.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

He pressed a kiss into her hair. “Hey. I guess you should know it wasn’t all fun and games.”

She looked up at him with a little smirk. “Not all ‘running, jumping, climbing shit’?”

He laughed, then fixed his face in a mock-stern expression. “Language, Cassandra.”

#

For a week or so she left her interrogations there. She flicked back over her dad’s journals, reframed with the knowledge that he must have faced the prospect of death in each adventure, but the feeling that she was still missing some important details nagged at her. It was as if she already had the clues, she just didn’t know what they were. 

It was all so much more complicated than her dad made out. She knew Chloe hadn’t always been on their side during the hunt for Shambhala (which was frankly nothing compared to the history they had with Nadine, but that was a whole other story) and despite all that Chloe was practically _family_ now. She didn’t know much about Harry Flynn except that he’d worked with her father a couple of times, double crossed him, shot him in the gut and died at Shambhala. 

_Your mom tried to help him but… he blew himself up… almost took us with him._

And the pieces fell into place with a lurch. She’d been focusing on her dad when all this time the clues were pointing to her mom.

#

The scars had faded a lot over the years, and her mom had never been self-conscious about them – something Cassie had a lot of respect for. In fact, she had a lot of respect for her mother in general, and it was already pretty obvious Cassie was going to follow in her footsteps in some kind of journalistic or academic capacity. She’d had a couple of articles published off the back of appearing in her parents’ show and her mom had proudly framed up each magazine cover in her office. Elena had only helped a little – some editorial here, some proofreading there, and some fundamental writing advice that had stuck with her: 

“It’s all how you tell the story. You can make anything sound exciting and interesting if you spin it the right way.”

And if that was so, then the opposite could also be true. Cassie knew her mother could twist a story whichever way she liked – sticking just close enough to the truth to get away with it. Cassie had known about her mom’s scars since she was tiny. Elena never tried to hide them. They were battle scars and she wore them with pride. She’d been a warzone journalist. She’d headed right into the worst of the action to expose a murderous psychopath. She’d lost her cameraman in the conflict and barely made it out after getting hit with shrapnel from a stray grenade.

At least that was the _story_. But Cassie had put two and two together. It was an elegant shuffling of the facts, that was all. But if Cassie was going to take after her mother she couldn’t _not_ snoop a little further.

She chose her moment carefully. They’d had their dinner out on the deck; her parents had a couple of glasses of wine in them and were bickering over who was going to wash the dishes while Vicky snuffled around under the table for crumbs.

“I’ll do it,” Cassie offered, and her parents stopped arguing in surprise. “In exchange for a question,” she added.

Nate and Elena gave twin sighs. “No more questions…” her father groaned.

“Just one!”

Her dad was shooting her a warning look. From what Cassie could guess he hadn’t told her mom about their little conversation the other day. But he couldn’t ground her for being curious, surely…

Her mom had caught the glance between them and was starting to look suspicious. She folded her arms. “One question. And you do the dishes for a week.”

“A week?!”

Elena’s lips twisted in a knowing smile. “By the look on your face, it’s gonna be a _big_ question.”

Cassie thought it over. _Worth it_. 

“Okay. A week.”

Her mom nodded, sealing the deal. “Alright then. Shoot.”

Her dad watched her with a grimace on his face. Cassie took a deep breath. “So… What I can’t work out is how the hell you got out of Shambhala.”

Her parents visibly relaxed for a moment. “We already told you,” Nate began, “The tree exploded, the city kinda… sank, and we ran like hell-”

But Cassie hadn’t finished and cut him off. “But you were both injured, right?" She nodded at her dad, "You’d been shot a few days before,” she said, then turned to her mom, hoping she wasn’t crossing a line, “And _you_ got caught in Harry’s grenade blast…”

The stunned silence was all the confirmation she needed. 

“So… how? And that must’ve been before you’d even found the tree and stopped Lazarević...”

Elena turned to Nate with a tight kind of smile, “I told you she wouldn’t be satisfied with the PG-13 version.”

Nate rubbed at his stubble wearily, “She’s been talking to Chloe…”

“Sounds about right.”

“Uh, hello?” Cassie said, waving both arms at her parents in case she’d suddenly become invisible.

“Chloe didn’t tell you about that part?” her mom asked.

“No… she, uh… got distracted by telling me about all the times Dad screwed up.”

Elena let out a loud ‘ha!’ and Nate grumbled into his drink.

“Now _that_ would be a long list,” her mom sniggered.

“So?” Cassie said impatiently, “What really happened?”

Elena leaned back in her chair and Cassie caught sight of a patch of scar tissue on her mother’s arm, beneath her sleeve. When she was little she used to pretend the blotchy marks were islands - an imaginary map across her mother's skin. For a second she wanted to take back her question. It made her feel sick to imagine her mom covered in blood, lost in the middle of nowhere, miles from a hospital…

“There was… an explosion. A grenade. I got too close,” Elena said shortly. “I was... maybe a little naïve back then.”

“Hey,” Nate said softly, gazing at his wife with a fierce kind of affection, “You tried to stop him. It was _noble_.” He tilted his head with a wince, “Aaaaand yeah, just a little naïve…”

Elena slapped his arm playfully. “Well, naïve, noble, whatever. I was in bad shape, and Lazarević had the jump on us, and… Chloe pretty much carried me out of there.” Her expression softened into admiration. “She was _relentless._ Wouldn’t let me give up. Hauled me all the way back through the city while your father was off… Wait, what _were_ you doing all that time?” she asked Nate with a frown of mock confusion.

Nate shot her a wounded look. “Uhh, just a little thing called saving the world?”

Elena snapped her fingers, “Saving the world, that’s it. Knew I’d forgotten something.”

The two of them shared a grin.

Cassie shook her head in disbelief. “You two have a serious hero complex, you know that?”

“It has been said,” her father assented with a curt nod.

Her mother jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards the kitchen. “Now… Dishes. Get to it, missy.”

Cassie gathered up the plates with only a little complaining. She watched her parents from the kitchen window as they scooted up on the bench seat and seemed to fold in on one another, fitting together like two pieces of a jigsaw. Her mom tucked into her dad’s shoulder and he rested his chin on her head, occasionally leaning down to muzzle her hair.

A part of Cassie’s teenage brain thought “ _Ugh, gross_ ,” at the sight of her parents being all smooshy, but another part – the part that was beginning to realise their adventure stories held a lot more darkness than they let on – felt a burning sort of pride for them. And yet another part made her wonder just how lucky she was that either of them were here at all.

The sun had gone down by the time she finished the dishes, but her parents were still outside, laughing and bickering by turns. Cassie snuck out the side door and across the beach to the office, to the cabinet that held so many of her parents’ secrets. She picked up the vial of resin once more – extra carefully this time – and watched the light pour through it, turning her fingers blue.

Well, that ticked one question off her list. But she had a feeling she hadn't even begun to scratch the surface.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is something I've been fooling around with. Got a few potential ideas involving Cassie continuing her cross-questioning with Sam, Sully and Nadine so let me know if you want more...
> 
> Oh, and I'm TOTALLY open to requests for particular moments from any of the UC games!
> 
> (Also, why the hell can't I write plain old fluff without making it angsty?!)


End file.
